Along with the films that bookend it in Terry Gilliam's CV – Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen – Brazil forms a loose trilogy concerned with dreamers. More so than the other two films, the dreams of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) are highly literal (he soars on wings in the sky but is dragged down by work, his mother, etc) and are integral to his survival and sanity. Gilliam famously had a rough time getting it into cinemas: the film was recut for a more conventional happy ending than the bleakly ambiguous one the story originally intended – and demanded – causing Gilliam to take out a full-page ad in Variety with an open letter to studio chairman Sid Sheinberg.

It's the story of the small man up against a huge, faceless bureaucracy, in a 1984-style future awash in stifling rules and regulations. But the rules don't work, the technology is prone to breaking – causing explosions blamed on "terrorists", a tag also applied to those who bend or break the rules, such the freelance plumber played by Robert de Niro. Beautifully staged, in many now demolished buildings that formed Britain's industrial landscape, Brazil is Monty Python meets George Orwell and it's as clever, witty and subversive as that sounds.